- The Many Ways to Thrive: What Thriveways Has Always Meant - May 17, 2026
- The Strength to Be Moved: Accepting Influence - April 17, 2026
- The Threshold: What Illness Reveals About Identity - April 2, 2026
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
A word worth pausing on
Thrive is one of the rare verbs in English with no clean synonym. Flourish comes closest, but feels botanical. Succeed is too narrow — it measures outcomes rather than aliveness. Grow is too vague, and prosper belongs to the language of commerce (and Vulcans). To thrive is something else: to be fully, particularly, recognizably alive in your own way.
The plural matters too. When I named the program Thriveways, the -ways was not decorative. It was the whole argument. There has never been one path. Anyone who has done this work — clinically, personally, or both — knows that the route a person takes toward their own flourishing is shaped by their history, their losses, their loves, their longings, the language they were raised inside, and the relationships they are still trying to learn how to inhabit.
I have come to believe that the plural is not just a fact about thriving: It is its precondition.
Why men, first
Thriveways began as a men’s mental wellness program because that is where the need was loudest and the silence had lasted the longest. The statistics are familiar to anyone who has worked in this field: men die earlier, suffer in quieter ways, seek help later, and are more likely to medicate their pain through substances, work, or withdrawal than to name it directly. I have walked that road myself, in my own way, and six years of sobriety have given me a particular respect for how much courage it takes a man to say I need this out loud.
So the program began where it began for honest reasons, but the philosophy was never small enough to stay there.
The hidden symmetry
Everything I have written on this site — about accepting influence, about illness and identity, about shifting from a fixed to a growth mindset — has been pointing at something I want to make explicit now.
Individual growth and relational health are not two separate projects. They are the same project, viewed from different angles.
When I wrote, in The Strength to Be Moved, about men who refuse to be influenced by their partners, the post was filed under both Men’s Mental Health and Relationship. That double categorization was the whole point. A man’s inner closure is also a woman’s invisible labor. A man’s openness is also a partnership’s safety. The interior life of one person becomes the lived condition of the people who love them.
This is true of women, too — and of couples, and of anyone who has ever tried to do the work of becoming. We do not flourish alone. The self that grows in isolation is not actually growing; it is rehearsing. Real change has to survive contact with the people who know us.
Rilke understood this better than almost anyone:
Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
That is the whole curriculum. The inner work that makes relationships possible. The relational work that makes inner growth real. They are not sequential. They are simultaneous, and each makes the other possible.
What broadening looks like
Women have begun to reach out — first one, then more — asking whether the program might have a place for them. The honest answer is that it always did. Couples have always been part of this work; the Gottman Method is, after all, the spine of my clinical training, and the only reason the men’s program existed in the first place is that I kept seeing, in couples therapy, that the inner work some men needed could not be done inside the couple alone. They needed a space that was theirs.
The same logic applies in the other direction. There are women who need a space that is theirs. There are couples who need both partners to be doing their own work in parallel with the work they do together. There are individuals — of any gender, any orientation, any relational configuration — who arrive at thriving through different doors.
Thriveways is opening to reflect what it has always been about: not a single demographic, but a single conviction. That growth is real when it is integrated. That the most important relationship is with yourself, and that the self is something we build, in part, through the people we love and the ones we learn to be loved by.
The life that anchors the work
I am writing this on a weekend in San Diego, in a life I did not always know how to imagine for myself. There is a life-partner. There is a dog. There is a park we walk to and a museum we keep returning to and a restaurant we are saving for next Friday. There is reading, and writing, and the slow patient work of learning to read music well enough to play what I hear in my head. There is a language — Spanish — I am still becoming fluent in, decades after I first dove in. There is a body that has been sober long enough that the gratitude has stopped being acute and started being structural.
None of this is incidental to the work: it is the work. A therapist whose own life is closed cannot credibly invite others to open theirs. A program built on the idea of many paths to flourishing has to be led by someone who is still walking one.
If you are reading this — whether you are a man who has been quietly considering reaching out, a woman who has been looking for a space that takes her seriously, a partner who suspects that some of the inner work needs to be done individually before it can be done together, or simply a person curious about what thriving might actually mean for you — there is a door here.
Plural by design. That is the whole idea.
Ready to begin?
Thriveways is now welcoming women and men for individual therapy, coaching, and small-group programs grounded in Gottman Method principles, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Internal Family Systems, and a humanistic approach to growth. If something in this piece resonated, schedule a complimentary 15-minute consultation, or reach out by phone at (619) 535-8890.
About the author
Jeffrey Young, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (CA & TX) and the founder of Thriveways, a mental wellness program dedicated to helping men and women deepen self-awareness, build emotional resilience, and create more meaningful relationships. He is Gottman Method Level 3 Trained and draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS) in his work with individuals and couples in San Diego and via telehealth throughout California and Texas.